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Nineties the age of gender equality

Nineties
the decade of gender equality
Ed Gordon for the IAAF
11 August 2001- Edmonton - If a visitor to the Tokyo World Championships in 1991
had fallen asleep for ten years and suddenly awakened for the Edmonton
competition, he would have had been surprised at the expanded list of stadium
events.

The enlightened decade of
the 1990s saw the addition of the pole vault, triple jump, and hammer
competitions for women, events which were being contested in many countries but
which had not been accorded full status in global competitions.

It was not a reaction to
any push towards “political correctness”. Quite the contrary, it was a move of
necessity, made to give these disenfranchised athletes a platform for showing
their talents.

The triple jump was the
first of the three events to catch the eye of female athletes. As early as
1984, it became a part of the NCAA championships in the US, and the following
year it was added to the US championship programme, where a modest leap of 13.17
gave Wendy Brown the first US title.

Russia, as the Soviet
Union, first crowned a national triple jump champion in 1986, and Britain
followed in 1989. Germany added the event in 1992, perhaps in preparation for
hosting the 1993 World Championships where the triple jump made its
international debut after almost a decade of waiting.

Anna Biryukova of Russia
made history as the first global champion with a world-record leap of 15.09.
The success of the event there led to its inclusion in the Atlanta Games, where
Inessa Kravets of Ukraine, the reigning world champion and world-record holder,
won the first Olympic gold with a jump of 15.33.

* * * * *

The
pole vault was next to be grasped by young women, particularly those in
gymnastics programmes.

Germany was one of the
early pioneers in establishing the vault as a championships event, adding it in
1992, the same year as the triple jump. The early move to full status
undoubtedly was instrumental in cultivating that nation’s high-level women’s
vaulting program as early as the mid-1990s.

Russia and Britain elevated
the event the following year, in 1993. Svetlana Abramanova was the first
Russian champion at 3.70, while Kate Staples first wore the gold in the UK with
3.20.

Stacy Dragila and her
American colleagues, on the other hand, had to wait until 1997 for official
recognition. Actually, the pole vault had been a title event in the 1996 indoor
competition, but since it was not to be included in the Olympic programme, it
was not officially contested at that year’s Olympic Trials.

Ironically, despite one of
its perceived roles as a developmental organization, the NCAA waited an
additional year, until 1998, before finally establishing the pole vault as a
championship event.

Then started the Age of
Dragila. The 1999 World Championships in Seville was the first to see a women’s
pole vault, as she won the first title by equalling the world record of 4.60.

In 2000, she captured the
first Olympic gold medal in the event, again tying the world record which was
still at 4.60. Then came her victory in Edmonton at 4.75 in that epic battle
with Russia’s Svetlana Feofanova.

* * * * *

The Seville Championships
came just a year after the IAAF’s highly successful “Year of Women” in 1998.
And swept in along with the pole vault onto the championship programme was the
women’s hammer. A year later the hammer also accompanied the pole vault as a
debutant events in the Sydney Olympics.

Like the pole vault, this
discipline was already far along in its development by the early years of the
1990s. Even as far back as 1991, the NCAA had added a 20-pound weight throw, a
sort of “indoor hammer”, to its indoor championships. And although that
organization didn’t crown an outdoor champion until 1996, the US federation
added the event as early as 1992, as Sonja Fitts won the first title with 56.48.

Two years before, in 1990,
the Soviet Union recognized 19-year-old Olga Kuzenkova as its first female
hammer champion.

Eventually, in 1993, both
Germany and Britain added the hammer at their top competition.

In Seville, Romania’s
Mihaela Melinte won the first World Championship gold with a powerful series,
capped by a 75.20 best. Early pioneer Kuzenkova took the silver, as she did in
Sydney in the first Olympic hammer for women, won by 17-year-old Kamila
Skolimowska of Poland.

In Edmonton, Cuba’s Yipsi
Moreno took the title with a late throw, pushing Kuzenkova to a bridesmaid
position for the third straight year.

* * * * *

In evaluating an event’s
development, it is instructive in some cases to compare the existing world
record of the men’s event with that of the women’s event.

In the established jumps,
the ratio of men’s to women’s world record is remarkably similar. The men’s
high jump record exceeds the women’s by 17 percent, and by 19 percent for the
long jump.

In the year the women’s
triple jump was added to the World Championships, that excess was 19 percent.
And in a statistical quirk, the two triple jump world records—still the existing
ones—established in the Gothenburg championships in 1995 showed the men’s
standard 18 percent ahead of the women’s. Such remarkable consistency
indicates, in rough measure, that the women’s triple jump has reached a level of
maturity in a very short time.

For the pole vault, such a
comparison becomes distorted because of Sergey Bubka’s remarkable career over
almost two decades. At the moment, his world record is 28 percent higher than
that of Stacy Dragila.

Even leaving Bubka’s marks
out of the comparison and focusing on the 6.05 jumps of Dmitriy Markov and
Maksim Tarasov, if the “usual” ratio of men’s-to-women’s records is followed,
the women’s record should be in the range of 5.08.

Perhaps this was what Bubka
was speaking of when he was asked in the early days of the Edmonton
championships whether he thought the women’s event had reached a high level.

Or it could show the
fallacy of such a simplistic comparison of marks, one which fails to include,
among other things, the inherent differences in the pole construction variations
between the men’s and the women’s events.

The inclusion of a
implements of varying weights certainly destroys all simple means of comparisons
of men’s and women’s throwing events.

Still, a look at the
women’s hammer all-time list shows relatively few marks from the past two
seasons, an indication that either the event has peaked (hopefully not) or has
at least temporarily hit a plateau while awaiting the next breakthrough.

Even with the addition of
these three events to international competitions in the past ten years, gender
equality still awaits the recognition of the women’s steeplechase.

Poland, Russia, Ukraine,
South Africa, Romania, Kenya and the US—all of these nations already contest the
event at the national championships. Presumably it will only be a matter of
time before we will see women splashing through the water at the World
Championships.